Tag Archives | tabloid

The woes keep piling on for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, as the homepage of its popular Sun paper was altered to feature an amusing fake report on the mogul’s committing suicide “in his topiary garden”. The Guardian notes:

News International websites for the Times and the Sun were taken down last night after hackers targeted the Sun‘s web pages and redirected traffic to another page falsely reporting that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead. The breach was apparently the first hack of a major UK newspaper’s website.

The LulzSec hacking collective hacked the tabloid’s site, and also claimed to be “sitting on their [the Sun‘s] emails” and that they would release the emails on Tuesday.

People had a thirst for blood-drenched, depraved news long before there was a New York Post or British Mirror or Sun to provide it each morning. The National Library of Medicine has published online a collection of murder pamphlets from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The brochures were sold on street corners and detailed the latest gristly crimes. Today they shed a light on villains from the dark underbelly U.S. history, such as Lucretia Cannon, circa 1841:

Cannon’s first name was Patty, but the press nicknamed her Lucretia after the Renaissance aristocrat who murdered her victims with poison. At 16, “Lucretia” married Alonzo Cannon, who died suspiciously of “failing health.” Widowed, she set up a tavern in Maryland, and headed up a gang which captured free blacks and fugitive slaves and sold them into slavery. She was alleged to have beaten a crying infant and then burned it alive; murdered tavern patrons for their money (one man was stabbed and stuffed into a trunk which her accomplices disposed of); killed a slaver by crushing his head in order to steal his two slaves.

Hacker, writer, Australian. Julian Assange certainly made a ruckus as the founder and chief of Wikileaks. Now he will be a columnist. Could this change to Aftonbladet be because Wikileaks is trying to get a lisence for journalistic protection and, while operating servers in Swedish, a column connection may just help? Daily Tech reports:

Embroiled in an international politics controversy and owner of one the internet’s most divisive properties, what’s a man to do? Well, if you’re Julian Assange, founder and chief of whistleblowing site Wikileaks, the answer is apparently “write for a tabloid”.

The Australian native who rose to infamy as a hacker in the late 1980s and early 1990s, announced in a Saturday interview [Swedish] with Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet that he would be joining the staff. A translation of the interview can be found here on Mathaba.

In the interview, when asked what is column will be about, Assange comments, “About press issues and about what’s happening around the world.